I should also mention that I've "dated" someone I accidentally met on Facebook. We decided we weren't compatible and are still pals. About a year or so after that, I dated someone that I met online that lived on the other side of the country. Hell, I never even heard the guy's voice in that incredibly short period of time we dated.

I haven't gone back to the dating scene in months. It's just not worth it. And why be in a rush to get into a relationship when there are so many single player games dying for your touch? Grab your controller, and mess with that baby all night.

Cool your jets. You've got so much ahead of you, man. Love will find you when it needs to.

I can't say I've ever thought to myself "why am I alone on valentine's day?" It is after all, just another day. And yes I know why I'm alone. I just don't care :]

This reminds me though. After hearing about 50 EHarmony commercials a day, I finally gave and started a profile just for kicks. I don't quite understand how they got across their "dimensions of compatibility" when I found that every match I was paired up with with mid 20 something year olds who worked at Starbucks and had a one year old. It was uncanny like I was paired with every girl in the states with low self esteem.

Needless to say I don't often check back with them and I sure as hell am not paying their fee just to look at some photos or to get my ID verified (evidently because they want to be sure I'm not some serial rapist or something). I still get emails often that say something to the degree of "You've got a new match!" that I promptly delete

In response to "The Truthiness of Simulation" from The Escapist Forum: I think this is a concept that plagued Spore to some degree; the scope of the game's concept was simply too huge to comprehend. To simulate the creation and evolution of an entire species from a single celled organism to a space-faring race of technologically advanced beings is a fantastic and whimsical endeavor to say the least, and yet that was what was promised.

Obviously the course of several million years of evolution had to somehow be squashed unceremoniously into 30+ hours of real world gameplay, and this effectively resulted in several disjointed minigames that tried desperately to mimic several other popular games, while at the same time offer a (slightly stylized) depiction of real world mechanics, biology and society.

The very idea of somehow simulating the advancement of an entire species simply isn't plausible; at least, not until the "civilization" stage. The rest of the game is crippled by it's own scope. The thought of simulating the evolution of an entire species using gameplay mechanics instead of actual accepted evolutionary fact (if I kill this creature, I can slap its mouth on everyone in my species? Darwin would be rolling in his grave). The truth needs to give way to gameplay sometimes, but I doubt we're ready for even a stylized simulation of evolution on Spore's scale yet.

I never got to the space stage, by the way. I wanted to create a peaceful, religious (peaceful, ha) race, 'cause I'm soppy that way, but I found the civilization stage was balanced too much in favor of the military and economic races, and I was bored by that point anyway.

The idea of verisimilitude, truthiness or whatever you'd like to call it is immensely important for immersion in a game.

This immersion is not based around graphics, as my experience (and that of others)of spending hours with old RPGs shows.

The illusion fails when the logic of the world collapses, and this can hinge on the smallest of details. For me, this can be the lack of available dialogue options, or perhaps my perfectly logical idea to get past a puzzle is not recognized by the game.